Team science – Ethics and transparency of author contributions

In contemporary academia 'team science' is a key component of academic life, and over the last thirty years, or so, there has been a noticeable trend towards more inter or multidisciplinary team based research Previously, social scientists would often undertake their research in relative isolation and produced singleauthored monographies.Today, most research and academic publications are a collaborative team effort Teams allow for different types of expertise to develop new insights, as well as specific methodological expertise to help strengthen the quality of empirical research.In addition, working in teams is often very inspiring, can boost creativity and result in strong intellectual knowledge contributions.With the emergence of team science as an academic norm, we also see the rapid rise in the number of multi-authored papers In some academic disciplines there can be many -very many! -authors associated with a single academic paper.According to Guinness World Records the most authors for a single peer-reviewed academic paper is 15,025 in a paper published in March 2021 relating to international data used for assessing patient safety during the Covid-19 pandemic (Guinness World Records, 2023).Prior to this, and to highlight the growth in multi-authored papers Ioannidis, Klavans and Boyack (2018) found, through a study of Scopus, that over 9,000 authors had published more than 72 papers in each calendar year between 2000 and 2016, equivalent to publishing a paper very five days.For most academics these figures are implausibly prolific.By 2023, we also see ChatGPT acknowledged as team member and credited as an author on peer-reviewed scientific papers (Stokel-Walker, 2023), which adds another dimension to the ethics of authorship.Whilst we support the trend towards team science, it also raises important questions about the authorship of manuscripts and the different contributions of the authors listed.Sometimes, teams of researchers can be clearly defined but often the distinction between the directly involved researchers and other researchers who provided support, input or feedback is not so clear (for an in-depth discussion see Helgesson et al., 2021).Underlying these questions are two fundamental -and connected -issues: research ethics and research transparency.The ethical issue related to team science refers to the question of whether someone is duly and fairly listed as a co-author of an article Younger scholars and PhD students may be pressured into including the names of senior colleagues/supervisors as co-authors to boost their publication records.In certain academic fields, it is normal practice to list the research group leader as a co-author even though they have not made any direct contribution to a paper.In other disciplines, this is regarded as an unethical practice and only the authors that make a direct contribution are to be listed as authors.In our field of study the norm seems to be a little unclear, primarily because authors in Information Polity come from a range of different disciplines, including political science, public administration and management, information